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Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

There were several years where having BOTH was desirable. Cell service was expensive, and battery life was short, so many folks carried a beeper that was always on, and a phone they turned on if they needed to make a call and had no land line option.

I've never understood the "it's a leash" thing. Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

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> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

You are right. However, a ringing phone in the mid-to-late 20th century created a ton of tension and was a movie trope. People felt obligated to respond to what they assumed was a human being on the other end.

Obviously, this obligation to respond has been diluted with robodialers and mixed messaging methods.

True. Conversations were dropped as soon as a phone rang. Mind you, this was also because most people didn't even have a caller ID display or answering machine so if you didn't answer you had no idea who had called. The curiosity factor was strong. These days I don't answer when I don't recognise the number.

The expectation of actually catching someone was much lower than these days though. Because of course not being at home meant not being reachable.

There's was also this unwritten rule about not calling people too late, which doesn't really happen anymore in my circles since people can now see whether you're active (eg on WhatsApp) and switch their phone on DnD when they sleep anyway.

Every communication channel fills with spam. Unless there's a direct disincentive like the cost of a Fedex overnight envelope, or strong moderation marketers/spammers will eventually comprise the majority of volume. Sometimes it's the "content" "creators" themselves who fill the channel with native advertising and clickbait.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

Do you though? Because people on the other end will often demand you respond to them if you have your mobile phone with you. This is why people consider it a leash.

Fuck 'em.

Several of us are not the top dog in our hierarchies and can suffer consequences for telling our superiors to fuck off

Grow a back bone. You can paraphrase "fuck off" in a nice but firm way, which is called setting a boundary. And if you dont' set them yourself, others will set them for you.

How do they know if you have the phone if you don’t pick up?

Because they see you're active on WhatsApp or telegram :)

I switched off the blue tickmarks in WhatsApp and even that really triggered people.

Can't you just read messages from the Notification Center if you want to avoid it showing up as "read"?

But then anyone else that can see my phone screen can read them :)

You mean the message contents, or that you received a notification at all? On both ios and android you should be able to configure the notification so the contents are not shown, so it shows that there's a notification from whatsapp but not the message itself.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

Oh, so you've never had the "why didn't you pick up/ call back/ answer my text/ etc" conversation with your partner? Lucky...

Not at our house. We decided early on that the phone was for the owner not everybody else. One of my sons even leaves it in a drawer, takes it out once a day to check.

That’s pretty cool. Your son has a better relationship to technology than a lot of adults. Probably reflects some good parenting, nice work.

“we” — you mean that you decided for your family, removing agency from other humans

I’m having a hard time understanding how allowing each person to use their phone as they please is removing their agency.

If you can't decide what is better for your kid, maybe you shouldn't be a parent.

I'm finding that the most stridently-held views on parenting tend to come from non-parents

Everybody else seems to accept that it's an endless series of tweaks, adjustments and highly context-specific compromises

> I'm finding that the most stridently-held views on parenting tend to come from non-parents

In this case is it the children ?

Sure, we have that discussion and I answer and we set clear boundaries.

One of the earliest labor principle is "if you can do it, you'll be forced to do it". Sometimes adding your capability will result in more burden to you instead of less. This is why sometimes it's a good idea to hide the fact that you're good with computer to your family; lest you become their tech support.

> and battery life was short

In the mid-'90s and 2000s phone batteries lasted longer than they do today, assuming the regular usage of the day.

Pretty sure they're talking a few years earlier than mid-90s. Think brick-like phones, not phones that fit in your pockets.

Maybe, it's not out of the question that some would do that but I've never had the feeling it was common or desirable even then. GP referenced the '90s hence my guess.

A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery, still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h of talk time from a charge but then again realistically very few people actually talked that much on the mobile in those days when even the networks would have severely limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really saved anything for talking time within a day, until you had the time to recharge.

I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to drain it when you had the time so you could charge it from 0.

Or, rather than worry about draining it to 0 before charging every day like you would a few years later once you wanted your phone to be on all day, you could only turn it on to return beeper messages, thus allowing many days of use before getting to 0 and recharging. That's the time period original commenter was talking about, and why it's different to the mid 90s / early 00s.

It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure) it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see why it would've been different somewhere like USA either.)

I really liked that the phone was mine, work didn't call me. The pager was for work, and they had to use that to get me to come in for issues. Nice clean separation.

I have actually enjoyed having both at previous jobs. If you’re oncall and you use your phone to receive oncall pages, you can’t turn it off or turn off notifications or even silence it. Having a separate physical device you can receive pages on keeps you less tied to your phone.

If I end up in this situation again I might try and get a cheap burner phone and only install the pager app on it.

...and some early cell phones couldn't even receive incoming calls so you still had to have a pager. Even after this was fixed it took a few years for incoming calls to work reliably when you were outside your home area.

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